Daily Archives: 2008/01/14

OMG, I have tried NetBSD and yes the wireless drivers worked – but then I couldnt update firefox because cairo package was not available. Subjectively it felt like the boot time and also every input took ages. And as I finally managed to get Firefox built it always crashed and the display was just weird. Maybe I did something wrong.Then I did not manage to log in via XDM I could only start sessions via startx and setting window manager via .xinitrc . I then decided to try out FreeBSD rather then trying to fix all issues as my overall feeling was that the quality of NetBSD isnt that good.

FreeBSD is very different: The install procedure reminds you on Debian or some Linux distros because you ask you a lot of questions. All is ANSI based – you know these gray, blue, yellow & red dialogs? And here are a few “bugs” (as I see it). The window managers dwm & wmii dont have an entry in /usr/local/share/xsessions .Which means windom display(login) managers like GDM do not see them. OTOH GNOME does have an entry, but its not installed. Seems like installing GDM gives you an entry for GNOME. These are really very simple bugs that can easily be solved. In my view all “.desktop” files in the xsessions directory should be owned by the package that gives you the window manager or in GNOMEs case the desktop environment. If there is no GNOME there should be any GNOME entry in the first place. Given the very long tradition of FreeBSD I am stunned that they still have such simple bugs. Maybe at some point they made a decision to do it differently but if – that decision was plain wrong. Its not that FreeBSD doesnt install a lot of stuff by default. If you just install Xorg you also get PolicyKit and such stuff. Another thing was that when you install Xorg you do not get the savage drivers that some Thinkpads use. This is actually the first distro that does not provide that by default. As this seriously influences the ability to start Xorg I cant imagine why one wants to remove that. Anyway I somehow found out the name and installed – before I had a 1600×1200 vesa display which is kind of a weird default?